WING CHUN WEDNESDAY; THE COUNTDOWN IS ON

Ironically it was because I thought Wing Chun to be stupid and ineffective that I could approach it from a position that allowed it to be what it was and not what I wanted it to be, what I found amazed me then and still does today.

TO UNDERSTAND WING CHUN WE MUST FIRST UNDERSTAND OURSELVES.

As an old man I can assure you that this is in fact the essential ingredient to every undertaking we embark upon.

psychologists have said for decades the majority of us do not hear new ideas, all we hear and are attracted to are different slants on our own way off thinking, and that our initial response is to ignore something we do not already know and agree with, that the majority of us cannot learn anything that we do not already know to a certain degree, all we can do is expand and improve what we know, often to the point where it begins to look like something new, something else, interestingly we lose sight of our myopia.

The vast majority of us only follow people that are already going in our chosen direction.

When I began Wing Chun training it was not because I wished to do it, it was because my partner wished to do it, she had heard that Wing Chun was a females martial art and wanted to check it out, my initial impression was that Wing Chun was stupid, I had a deep martial arts and sports fighting background and could see at once that none of this stuff would work, I still think the same way about most mainstream Wing Chun, and I have trained with some of the most respected masters on the planet.

Ironically it was because I thought Wing Chun to be stupid and ineffective that I could approach it from a position that allowed it to be what it was and not what I wanted it to be, what I found amazed me then and still does today.

Everyone connected in any way to Wing Chun will tell you that it is a concept based martial art, but trying to get anyone to expand on this, even distinguished masters, is usually fruitless.

Wing Chun suffers from being stuck in a bit of a time warp, I happen to agree that we should not bring anything into Wing Chun that is not already there, but I do not see the value in maintaining a style of thinking that is completely outdated.

There is no need to try an reinvent Wing Chun, but there is a great need to rethink it, we live in the 21st Century with an internet that gives all of us access to information that was not even known in the time of Ip Man, and we would do well to avail ourselves of it.

In 1968 at the Summer Olympics in Mexico a young man named Dick Fosbury changed the world of high jumping by going over the bar backwards, his style broke all the previous conventions of high jumping and today it is the standard way of high jumping.

He developed his style through the appliance of science, he was an engineering major and began working on manipulatinghis centre of gravity keeping it as low as possible as long as possible, the rest as they say is history.

Wing Chun needs a Fosbury Flop moment.

I do not see Wing Chun as a fighting style in and of itself, this would explain why Wing Chun people keep loosing fights, I see it more as a body method to understand how to operate more effectively, I do not share the belief that our Forms are invaluable and important, I do not personally think that they have any particular value outside of understanding basic physical movement, however I do think that using them to better understand basic physical movement is a critical first step, a starting point, sadly many student see them as the final destination.

I do not believe that we need to “Think outside the box” to update Wing Chun, but I do think that we need to rearrange the furniture, this will be the aim of the next site, not to tell people where to put the furniture, just to encourage them to move it about in a way that suits them best.